The videos and stories were everywhere. A gaggle of autonomous cars stuck in an unrecognized construction zone. A robotaxi stopped dead in traffic. A self-driving car failing to sense a traffic signal and crashing into another car—or, even worse, a person.
Normally, firms and industries don’t recover for years from this kind of negative attention—and some never recover at all. But remarkably, business for self-driving vehicles has only sped up. Once considered experimental, unpredictable, and even dangerous, autonomous vehicles are suddenly being embraced. In cities such as Phoenix, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami, they’ve quietly become just another transportation option. “Once people experience a ride in a self-driving car, they get over their initial fear and using them becomes commonplace,” says Matt Wayne, managing director and partner at research firm L.E.K. Consulting.
According to an L.E.K. study, one-quarter of people in cities served by autonomous vehicles have ridden in one. Of those, 92 percent said they felt safe during their ride—seven out of 10 said they felt safer than they would have with a human driver. Getting more people to experience self-driving vehicles is one key to the industry’s growth, which is why it’s in the midst of its biggest expansion phase to date, with plans to put self-driving cars on the streets in at least a dozen new markets by the end of the year.
To be sure, the industry spent heavily on PR campaigns and lobbying to convince more cities and the public to accept the use of self-driving cars. As experts point out, autonomous-vehicle firms rolled out the vehicles exclusively in metropolitan areas, with their lower speed limits, in order to boost safety records. A government stat the industry often puts out: Since 2021, only about 4 percent of crashes involving self-driving vehicles have been attributed to the autonomous system itself; most were caused by another driver or road user. “The runway to grow gets longer the more the safety aspect improves,” says John Buechli, a principal in Korn Ferry’s Global Industrial Practice specializing in automotive and manufacturing.
For leaders, there are parallels to some of the challenges presented by AI in the workplace. As Wayne notes, self-driving cars won’t completely replace existing modes of transportation, just as AI won’t take over every job. But the more exposure humans get to the technology, the more comfortable they’ll become with it. “There’s always going to be a fight against perception,” says Wayne, “but the proof is in the pudding.”
The question now is whether all this one-sided publicity will stick. Driverless cars still make mistakes, of course. And, like airplane crashes or virus outbreaks on cruises, those events tend to stick in peoples’ minds. Brad Marion, global sector leader for Korn Ferry’s Automotive practice, cautions that public confidence remains fragile. He notes that the electric-vehicle market swung from exuberant growth forecasts to production cutbacks and multibillion-dollar write-downs, and warns that “all it takes is one or two high-profile accidents to revive the public’s mistrust.”
